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Who let the robo-dogs out? At CES 2019, Continental demonstrated their package delivery concept — and it involves robo-taxis driving canine-inspired robots that autonomously bring deliveries right to your doorstep.

With the Continental Urban Mobility Experience (CUbE), the tech company hopes to provide a “seamless mobility chain,” comprised of a driverless vehicle and a delivery robot to deliver packages all the way to the customers – even when they’re not able to physically receive them.

Continental’s proposal will eliminate the need to even go out and meet the van, but deploying delivery robo-dogs that can navigate sidewalks, walk up front porch steps, go right to the door, and even ring doorbells.

“With the help of robot delivery, Continental’s vision for seamless mobility can extend right to your doorstep. Our vision of cascaded robot delivery leverages a driverless vehicle to carry delivery robots, creating an efficient transport team,” said Ralph Lauxmann, head of systems and technology for Continental’s Chassis & Safety division. “Both are electrified, both are autonomous, and in principle, both can be based on the same scalable technology portfolio.”

Photo Credit: Continental AG

Continental believes the concept will be important as online shopping continues to surge and delivery costs per hour rise. And to reduce idle times, the CUbE’s driverless vehicles can be used as an addition to public mass transport.

“There will be peaks in demand for driverless vehicles during the day. To make use of driverless vehicles outside those peak ‘rush’ hours is where robot-delivery comes in,” said Jeremy McClain, director of systems and technology for Continental North America.

He adds: “We see great potential in our automotive technology to support robotics companies in developing autonomous delivery robots as an additional use case for driverless vehicles.”